Category Archives: Google Adsense

We all love Google Adsense, don’t we? Ever want to let the Adsense team know how you feel about the program? Well now you can. Adsense is currently running a survey to learn more about their publishers’ satisfaction
in regards to the available payment methods that they offer. So if you hate getting a check every month and for whatever reason can’t hook up your bank account to your Google Adsense account, now’s the time to let them know.

I have to admit that most mornings, in addition to checking my email, I check to see how much I earned in my Google Adsense account. I must admit that I don’t make a whole lot off of it but getting that check every couple of months is a big help.

Imagine my surprise this morning to find about $40 missing from my Google Adsense account’s running total since my last payment. In fact it actually brought me under the $100 requirement to receive a check from Google Adsense at the end of next month. With ten days left until the end of the money, there’s plenty of time to get back over that requirement but that’s still a chunk of change.

I’d be lying to say I wasn’t concerned. I only find a few folks talking about the missing money from their Google Adsense accounts but it’s a recent thread. Most folks are reporting that the money is only disappearing for a couple of hours and reappearing a short time later. There’s no mention of a problem on the Google Adsense blog and no reports on the user side of the Google Adsense account

My forty bucks has been missing since I checked at about 7:30 am this morning. That makes it about 5 hours for me. How’s everybody else doing with their account? Find any cash missing? Or did all the missing money show up in your account? (And are you going to keep it?)

Update: The money is back in my account. I noticed also a large number of clicks added back into that total as well. Hopefully this is the last of it.

Update #2: Gone again but today’s clicks are in there. Ain’t this fun?

So anyway, I still have things to do today. I guess I have to to use another search engine to get some work done.

I’ve used MSN a number of times previously, usually to see how different search engines compare with certain search terms. So I headed over to MSN.com to give it a try.

Imagine my complete surprise when the above captcha pops up. Not once, not twice but every single time I did a search. And it wasn’t an easy captcha either but captchas with other characters in the background, making it harder to read. (At least for me.)

Now, I’m not a big fan of captchas. I’ve noticed that they really don’t work and are easy to beat. MSN isn’t alone with their use either. Google’s done it before, recently as well, and they’re not that easy to read either. (Rather long if you ask me.) I don’t see it that often though on Google. And it didn’t take 5 tries that it did with some of MSN’s.

Got an interesting email in my inbox a few days ago. Here’s a copy of it:

Dear Publisher,

We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.

Sincerely,

Kim Scott
Director AdSense Online Sales & Operations

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

This email is regarding the AdSense account associated with ca-pub-8234810200509513.

While it’s nice that Google Adsense is concerned about the “recent economic turmoil” that we’re going through, I have to admit that I’m really getting fed up with them. Time and time again, when I view my blog, all I see is adverts for Family Guy and Dungeons and Dragons stuff in the right sidebar. Granted posts about those subjects are fairly popular on this site, I serious doubt they’re displaying to those folks interested in those topics.

Now I know I’m not supposed to tell you my percentages and I’m not going to. This site hasn’t done that well with them. The Youtube video downloader simply in scale as it gets considering the number of hits each day it gets. And it gets a lot of them. It kind of balances out and the other site supports this one.

Now I’ve tried tricks to get decent adverts to display. We used to get nothing but steak adverts here which did little good. I wrapped both the title line and the h1 tag line in code that told the Google Adsense bots to not look at that stuff and it pretty much worked. At least I rarely see them. But what do I see on my Gallery or Flickr? Post? You guess it. D&D and Family Guy. What a surprise.

I for one hope something can be done about this as I’m out of ideas.

Now I’m going to sit back and watch all the Google Adsensespam hit this post. And, no, that’s not why I wrote it.

Just got the following in my inbox. Google Adsense has decided to return their referrer rates back to their older scale and to ditch the first level payouts. (The $5 kickback when someone you’ve signed up earned their first five bucks themselves.)

Gotta admit that I’m torn on this. The $5 bounty was something that I was able to nab quite a few times, including one money where I earned more on bounties than I did on actual clicks. Too many folks don’t realize how hard it is to $100 within 180 days unless your site is targeted or has very heavily traffic.

Here’s the email they sent out:

Hello AdSense publisher,

We are writing to share some important information with you aboutreferrals to the AdSense product. As part of ongoing efforts tooptimize revenue opportunities for our publishers, we areconstantly experimenting with new revenue-enhancing features aswell as tweaking those products already available to ourpublishers.In this spirit, we will be making some significant changes toreferrals for the AdSense program in the coming weeks.

As some of you may remember, in February 2007, as an experiment,we raised the bounty paid (from $100 to $250) when a publisher yourefer brings in $100. We have decided to conclude this experimentand return to the original paid bounty amount of $100. Inaddition, we will no longer be offering the $5 bounty for thefirst $5 that a referred publisher brings in or the $2,000 bonusfor referring 25 publishers earning $100 or more in any 180 dayperiod. $100 will be the only bounty paid for referrals to theAdSense program.

If you’re currently displaying referral units on your sitedirecting users to sign up for AdSense, read on below for detailsabout what to expect in the coming weeks.

In early January, your AdSense account will be updated to onlynote the $100 payment for referring users to AdSense. You willcontinue to be paid under the current bounty structure ($5, $250,$2,000) until late January, after which you will receive $100 oncea referred publisher brings in $100 within 180 days.

Thank you for referring users to AdSense in the past. Weapologize for any inconvenience this news may cause.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Google Inc.1600 Amphitheatre ParkwayMountain View, CA 94043

Email
preferences: You have received this mandatory email service
announcement to update you about important new AdSense features.

I’m so sick of seeing all the restaurant adverts in my sidebar. Gotta
admit that I was very happy with what I was earning on the adsense but,
since all we’ve seen is the restaurant adverts, it’s now dropped down
to pennies a day. I’ve been dropping all the URLs that I can into the
block list but there’s always more right behind them.

Rusty Brick gives us an arguement on why Ugly Sites Earn More With Google AdSense. Basically he says that “people land on the site, and immediately want to click off. They find the nearest ad, and most attractive part of the page, which happens to be the AdSense ad, and clicks off. Phew, they are saved and they move on to a real dating site, that is both professional looking and functional.”